Jack Nichols, who died Monday at age 67 in Cocoa Beach, Fla., was a 1960s-era gay liberation activist who went on to become an editor of gay periodicals and the author of books addressing homosexuality from a range of perspectives.

He claimed to have organized the first public demonstration for gay rights, in 1965, and to have written the first activist account of events at the Stonewall Inn in June and July of 1969, when gays and police clashed in the streets around Sheridan Square. The near-riots represent an iconic period in gay history.

That same year, Nichols helped found GAY, the first national gay newsweekly. He also wrote a long-running column for Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine and edited Sexology, a sex-therapy magazine.

His 1975 book “Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity” continued his most comprehensive statement of the liberationist zeitgeist, although the philosophy did not exactly catch on.

Nichols grew up in Chevy Chase, Md., the son of an FBI agent. He once said that he “deservedly graduated only from sixth grade,” but he was a committed autodidact and by his midteens had discovered a lifelong devotion to the poetry of Walt Whitman. He said he was out of the closet at age 13.

In 1960, already a seasoned denizen of Washington’s homophile underground, Nichols co-founded the D.C. branch of the Mattachines, a loosely knit national organization that regarded the struggle for gay liberation as a civil rights issue. The 1965 demonstration, which he organized over the objections of more conservative members, came in response to reports that Fidel Castro had been interning homosexuals in concentration-camp conditions. A small group of sign-wielding picketers marched outside the White House, although it was not exactly clear what they expected the president to do about it. Publicity was minimal, but a watershed had been reached.

“Do you think we’ll bring down the wrath of society on our heads?” Nichols recalled asking his lover, Lige Clark.

“Society is already sitting on our heads, and we’re just asking them to get the hell off,” Clark responded.

In 1967, Nichols and Clark moved to New York, where Nichols became sales manager for Underground Uplift Unlimited, which manufactured buttons bearing slogans like “Make Love, Not War” and “More Deviation, Less Population.”

Nichols then teamed with Clark to write the weekly Screw column titled “Homosexual Citizen,” and it was there that the early activist account of Stonewall first appeared on July 8, 1969.

“The homosexual revolution is only part of a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society,” they wrote. “We hope that ‘Gay Power’ will not become a call for separation, but for sexual integration.”

They went on to call for the American Psychiatric Association to drop the qualification of homosexuality as a form of mental illness, and for the government to stop making “our manner of lovemaking a crime.”

After founding GAY magazine, Lige and Clark collaborated on a memoir titled “I Have More Fun With You Than Anybody” (1972) and a book of advice on male relationships, “Roommates Can’t Always Be Lovers” (1974). The books represented an important perspective on gay relationships, treating them as just as healthy and fulfilling (or not) as heterosexual ones. In 1975, Clark was murdered under uncertain circumstances in Mexico.

Already familiar with gay beach culture – in 1976 he produced “Welcome to Fire Island” – Nichols moved to Florida in the early 1980s, where he contributed weekly columns to gay papers in Miami and Atlanta. He became an early AIDS protester, and then dropped out of journalism for several years.

In 1996, he published the polemical “The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists.” He then took a job editing the online magazine Gay Today.

In recent years, he had assumed the role of an elder statesman of the gay movement, most recently transmogrified into “LGBT” for insiders. In 2004, he sat on the lead float at the New York Heritage of Pride parade, celebrating the 35th anniversary of Stonewall.

Irreverent to the end, he also published another memoir, “The Tomcat Chronicles; Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer.”

Jack Nichols

Born March 16, 1938, in Chevy Chase, Md.; died May 2 at Cape Canaveral Hospital in Cocoa Beach, Fla., of the effects of cancer; survived by his mother, Mary Lund.